Rather like the guests in Agatha Christie’s book, “And Then There Were None”, people have been disappearing recently at work.

This isn’t the result of any foul play but the time of year. People are heading out for their summer holidays. Now, that wouldn’t be bad apart from the fact that I need to be two other people for the next few weeks as well as myself.

Today is day one and already it is has been “interesting” :

Two little Soldier boys were out in the sun;
One got all frizzled up and then there was one.

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“If you’re serious about increasing your strength, follow this six week training program and you’ll soon be on your way to completing 100 consecutive push ups!”

With me spending more and more time siting at a desk or stuck in a car there’s more and more of my waistline to control.

Perhaps the answer is on One Hundred Pushups ?

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There is something very special about seeing a city from it’s river especially if you are en route to see the treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb...

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“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.”

William A Foster

Unfortunately we’d made an unwise choice this evening. I’d wanted to take K out for a meal to celebrate her birthday and I had two places in mind. The country pub I’d eaten in a few times with Karen or our local Italian. We’d decided on the local Italian as that was in walking distance, we had always had a good time and good food there and we wanted to support a local independent business.

Things, unfortunately, went wrong from the moment we set foot in the place. Upstairs they now have a wine bar so people can enjoy a drink before sitting at their table. The problem with it is that you seem to loose your place in the queue for the next available table so the wait goes on and on. That would be OK if upstairs hadn’t been taken over by a party of twenty or so people who had almost every sofa formed in a large circle that excluded everyone else in the bar.

Downstairs on a busy Friday night things got no better. Gone was the feeling of being welcomed - people were seated as fast as possible, the order taken and that was that. Whilst you may want to get as many people through the door as possible on a busy night there is no excuse for ordering white wine and receiving red, the main course arriving before the cutlery or for fish that was so overcooked it was more like chicken and for chicken that could have been used to knock in nails.

I guess it will be a while before we return. In pursuing profit they have lost the edge they had which was the care and quality they demonstrated to their diners. What is left is really no different from the chains in the town and is, perhaps now, the unwisest choice of many alternatives.

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Another year, another summer, another chance to book for The Proms missed.

Now I’ll be back to listening to them in the garden on the radio.

I really, really must book for The Globe…

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At last I have some control on this work.

All the information in a central Sharepoint database which we can all update together and in which documents can be stored and associated with the records.

An Outlook task for every bit of work in which I have the link to the Sharepoint record for that item. In the task I can record what needs to be done, prompts for what I need to do in the next few days. I can set the date for the task to bring it forward, track when I pass the action to someone else and, if I need, defer it for a few days.

Of course, none of that stopped them saying to me when I walked into the office, “drop everything this is critical”, but it did let me pick up the pieces a lot easier when I got home this evening….

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• Year one - haute cuisine in London
• Year two - a Cuban birthday
• Year three - night face cream from your Uncle and a new pair of slippers …

Wonder what next year will bring.

Happy birthday K !

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Wordle seems to the latest toy sweeping the blogsphere. It lets you create a word cloud from either text that you enter or your blog’s RSS feed.

Fun eh?

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Me : “Hi I’m calling to because I don’t have any of my credit cards apart from this one. I need access to some money and I don’t have a PIN for this card”.

Them : “We can issue a new PIN over the phone. Oh, we can’t our systems down but you can do it via our website”.

Time moves on.

Me : “I’ve registered on your site and tried to set my PIN but I can’t - the option doesn’t appear on the site”.

Them : “You need to use the site of X as they run the card”.

Time moves on again.

Me : “I’ve tried to register on the website of X but that goes to the same place that your site does and I still can’t set my PIN”.

Them : “You can in a few days time”.

Some time later I go to the cash dispenser, guess the number, get some money and go shopping.

A fine example of financial security.

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“It’s rather like a pub carvery”, said K’s Uncle as we gathered around the table outside to collect each of us armed with a plate.

The vine was too overgrown to sit under so we decided to make the most of the sun and have Sunday lunch outdoors.

It’s been seven weeks since we all sat down together. We were all wondering just when it would happen again.

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I should know better than to play I Spy with Joanne. I also need to exfoliate.

A large family gathering to celebrate Fhai’s birthday and to plan for the weekend…

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A house with three floors used to be a rare thing. Nowadays thanks to Mr Barratt there’s a lot more of them about.

Jo and Dan own one of them and, by way of thanks for taking their wedding pictures, kindly had us over for an excellent three course meal with just as many courses of wine.

After all that food and drink I began to realise why two floors are better than three.

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Sometimes life really just seems unfair.

A very bad hand dealt in the wrong direction …

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I’d forgotten just how far you walk in a day when you are in the office.

Many years ago when I used to run a support team I made sure I walked the floor a few times a day with a sheaf of papers in my hand that I’d printed off from the call handling system.

Now it’s a copy of my diary and the 80 odd things I need to do today printed in a list splattered with lines of angry red showing the things that slipped yesterday.

Of course not knowing my way around the place doesn’t help at the moment as I end up on the wrong floor or wrong wing.

At least my waistline is feeling the benefit….

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This NeXT workstation (a NeXTcube) was used by Tim Berners-Lee as the first Web server on the World Wide Web. Today, it is kept in Microcosm, the public museum at the Meyrin site of CERN, in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland.

The document resting on the keyboard is a copy of “Information Management: A Proposal,” which was Berners-Lee’s original proposal for the World Wide Web.

The label on the cube itself has the following text: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”

Just below the keyboard (not shown) is a label which reads: “At the end of the 80s, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web using this Next computer as the first Web server.”

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While K was sitting in a very posh tent in the rain in Wimbledon I was driving around sarf London trying to avoid the mini marathon which had closed off my usual route into the City.

Underground and overground today was a very wet, very frustrating day…

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It’s been far too long since we caught up with Karen but today we finally got a chance to deliver the presents and enjoy a beer in the sun.

Watching Elizabeth unwrap her lippy and bangles I wonder just what happened to the little girl who rode around the hills of the Lake District on my back and fell asleep in her plate of baked beans….

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So, the end of another week.

We could both do with better health, less stress at work and a good night’s sleep.

Laters.

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Normally K leaves the house to return some hours later.

Today she left, came home, went out, came home, we went out and we came home.

Over one hundred miles done, eating late and little time together.

This just isn’t fun…

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So, Bill Gates has now officially retired.

We shared the same years in IT but he gave up a lot sooner than me.

We grew up with the promise of Gem and the disappointment of Windows 3.1.

Now we have the bloatware of most Microsoft applications, the prevalence of them in the marketplace and the better years ahead with Opensource.

Here’s to your retirement and many successful years of the Gates Foundation.

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No, not the English popular beat / ska combo from jolly Camden Town but the amazing news K came home with today.

Still, perhaps, the words of Suggs sum it up best …

Madness, madness, they call it madness
Madness, madness, they call it madness
It’s plain to see
That is what they mean to me

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“It’s a bit like how the International Stores used to be”, I said to K, immediately realising that she had probably never heard of them.

It wasn’t until many years after it closed that I realised that there were many International Stores across the country and that Mr and Mrs White who lived up from the road from my Mum and Dad weren’t incredibly rich as a result of owning the largest shop in the town.

After yesterdays trip into London we had decided to stay closer to home doing less exciting things today. The farm shop was certainly a change from those we had seen yesterday in St. James.

After the subtle product placement, lighting and careful displays of Sainsbury’s this store was a refreshing change. Vegetables ran into cheeses which sat next to a mixture of dry goods which flowed into things for the garden and hanging baskets.

No pressure selling, misshapen vegetables and bratwurst from Germany, Mr White would be proud.

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“Excuse me Sir, you have a very lucky face”, said the Indian man to me.

“Your face is very lucky, you will have very good fortune for the next few months, you will have to work hard but you will get a lot of money”.

I wasn’t sure why he had chosen me as I was feeling far from lucky. We had come into London to see a photography exhibition but I’d picked a combination of the wrong day and the wrong venue to visit on so that hadn’t worked.

I’d picked somewhere to eat which didn’t live up to it’s promise so we abandoned that idea in favour of one K had visited recently. That turned out to be closed for lunch.

The one around the corner where we did eat was pretentious and rather like eating in an hotel lobby. “Did you see the painting of the woman behind the bar ?”, K asked. I had. It looked rather like a soft porn photography from the 1970s painted in acrylic paint.

Apparently the most notable feature of it wasn’t the silk draped over her eyes but the lack of care and attention to a certain part of her anatomy.

The food was nice but not amazing. Asparagus salad with quail’s eggs and crab salad followed by chicken tortellini and pan fried red mullet on black eyed beans and broad beans. The service was attentive. The problem was there just was no ambiance.

As we left, in a flurry of goodbyes from the staff I had to look. The only problem was the woman serving behind the bar. What if the picture was of her ?

I decided in the end to defer to chivalry and not stop and stare just in case she was the one who was not being attentive there.

After such an eventful day I was surprised to be the only person in Bond Street to have a lucky face. I thanked him before the conversation turned to me sharing some of my current wealth with him to secure the secret of how I could unlock future wealth and we headed home.

The Tube in summer isn’t the best place to be. Not on the Piccadilly line crushed into a carriage with a small woman with a wheely case trying to get onto the remaining few square inches of space on the train while a large Russian man is lifting his case above your head as he pushes himself and the wheely case lady onto the train to the sound of the driver shouting, “STAND CLEAR OF THE DOORS NOW”.

So, I’m taking my lucky face outside this evening to sit and watch some stars, burn some logs and enjoy not being in London for a while.

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“Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they’re supposed to help you discover who you are.”

Bernice Johnson Reagon (American Historian and Musician. b.1942)

I’m not sure if they are helping me discover who I am, they are helping me discover more abut other people, some of which is quite startling….

Posted by Mark at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

K “I bought some polenta”.
Me “That’s good, we wanted couscous”

I’m off to look for ways to use a bag of dry polenta.

Update : this strawberry and polenta shortcake recipe may be the answer….

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Social networking joins up BT - 03 Apr 2008 - Computing

“It lets us see people’s skills and competencies, allowing us to create communities for addressing specific challenges.”

The internal network has also made it easier to handle the growing need for co-operation across different work disciplines, said Bross.

“As you start to see the formation of ecosystems within the supply chain that can improve your business operation, you often have to move across industries to find the right solution.

“For example, something that worked well in the finance systems could provide benefits to the pharmaceutical sector as well,” he said.

“We have created a massive wiki to help create an understanding between people around the globe, so that everyone is working with the same definition of terms,” said Bross.

I don’t think I will ever be able to turn Sharepoint into something as interesting as Facebook but the more I think of it the more I feel that’s where I’d like to go.

The more I look at the sites we create at work the more I think they fail simply to engage with people. The look more like the static websites people used to throw up in the 80’s with a list of links and an About Me page.

The idea of putting people in charge of micro-sites is a good idea. Not telling them how to make their sites interesting (or even fun), how to attract and keep an audience or how to promote them is a serious failure.

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So, in a round of corporate re-organisation all the people I brought in over the last few months move on elsewhere in the company and new ones appear in their place.

I feel bad that this has happened before we got to know each other and I’ll miss the chance to get to know the organisation and the role with them. In a way I feel we could have grown up a little together and made sense of all this madness.

I guess the best I can hope is that I gave then as good a start as I could.

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So, in the space of a few months we have gone from one to three Wikis that I now have a hand in.

I know that sort of breaks the idea of a single repository of information but the fact that we have any at all; that the ones we do have people are enthusiastic about and that they are on a supported product set (albeit Sharepoint which has as much to do with information sharing as I have with Lithuanian) is a great step forward.

I’m sitting running WOS for my own ends and every time I try to do anything other than put simple text into Sharepoint I grimace at the lack of functionality but people are slowly begining to see the value of collaborating and sharing information.

Maybe blogging at work will be next ?

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Shanties and Sea Songs - Lyrics

Where it’s wave over wave, sea over bow
I’m as happy a man as the sea will allow
There’s no other life for a sailor like me
But to sail the salt sea, boys, sail the sea
There’s no other life but to sail the salt sea

It was windy enough to set sail for distant shores but all we had on our minds was to enjoy a little sun, wander by the sea and watch the seagulls make comedy landings on the beach…

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“It’s wireless, Internet radio”, I explained as Martin unwrapped his present.

It seems a long time since we sat in his front room listening the radio with the green eye that we tried to sell and here we are over a year later with Internet radio.

Today we all met for what was supposed to be a combined summer Solstice party and birthday party for Martin but instead became the marking of another year passed.

Happy Birthday !

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So I have an evening in alone.

Do I go for Chinese and wonder what “Husband and wife’s lung slice” is, or if “Chicken without sexual life” is a comment on why I’m alone or do I call Dominos …

Perhaps a DVD and some planning for a summer Solstice party is what I need …

Laters.

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A few things which have caught my eye ….

• Senseless management speak- Impacting is my current hate…
• Panzanella to cook on a summer’s day
• Anti-graffiti
• Daily Life in Sadr City, Iraq

Posted by Mark at 7:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Sharepoint fun goes on :

• displaying a number as 1234 rather than 1,234 means using a text field
• it seems impossible to get rid of the text field that every database seems to have
• images in Wikis, how hard is it to put them in ?

There’s a lot to be said for OpenSource systems, one of things being ease of use….

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